Some articles.
Mar. 11th, 2006 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
On bird flu and pets in Europe
Bird Flu Fears and New Rules Rattle German Pet Lovers
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
SINGEN, Germany, March 2 — Hannelore Kirchenmaier burst into the animal shelter here on Thursday, desperate for advice after a chain of events turned the town's household pets into objects of angst.
First, a stray cat died of bird flu on the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. Before long German authorities decreed that all cats had to be kept indoors throughout areas where infected wild birds had been found, including Singen. They also said dogs should stay on leashes when outside.
So there are now millions of pet owners in Germany trying to contend with their beloved four-legged bundles of trouble.
"What are we supposed to do?" asked Ms. Kirchenmaier, 51.
She takes regular care of a friend's dog that has suddenly befriended a wild cat. Should she keep the dog away from the cat? And how could she keep the cat away from birds? "I'd take the cat," she said. "But I already have seven myself."
Bird flu's rapid march from Asia to Europe and Africa has created waves of anxiety and economic disruption; the poultry industry is disabled in much of Europe.
Meanwhile, only the one cat is known to have died of the virus in Europe, and that was far from this town of 44,000, which lies near sprawling Lake Constance, a stone's throw from Switzerland.
But when a dead duck found in Singen was confirmed to have the lethal A(H5N1) strain of bird flu last week, the town became a hotbed of dread. It is facing a challenge to its mood and social rhythms, if not its health.
Cats can become infected with A(H5N1) by eating infected birds but it is very rare. And medical authorities say there is barely any chance of a cat passing the disease to humans.
Such reassurance in Singen came from the head of the animal shelter's board, Marion Csajor, whose precise directions calmed Ms. Kirchenmaier. Feed the wild cat to keep it from gnawing on dead birds, Ms. Csajor counseled her, and tell the authorities immediately if it shows signs of sickness.
Satisfied, Ms. Kirchenmaier hurried off to take the leashed dog on its afternoon walk.
What the shelter cannot do, Ms. Csajor explained later, is take in cats and dogs whose owners now feel threatened by their pets. The 86 cats, 22 dogs and assorted other small critters are her primary charges. "We have to protect the ones we already have," she said.
As the shelter fielded visits and phone calls almost without end, the city government has also been at work.
Last Saturday night, the mayor, Oliver Ehret, received a call from the agriculture minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg confirming that Singen's dead duck had the lethal strain, the mayor's assistant recalled.
The next morning, the assistant, Michael Hübner, looked out of his office window at the town's traditional pre-Lent festival only to see a man cavorting about in a chicken costume. "Boy, if you only knew," he recalled thinking to himself.
The first order of business for Singen was to create quarantine zones from which no birds or bird products could be brought. With only about 3,000 hens in town, laying eggs mainly for private use, this was a fairly minor development.
By early this week, in bitter wintry weather, three two-man teams in brilliant orange uniforms were scouring the banks of the river Aach — where the infected duck was found — in search of other dead fowl. One pair, Werner Sauter and Helmut Heerre, were enjoying minor celebrity status as the town's primary defense against bird flu.
"Lots of people do notice now that there are men in uniforms along the river," Mr. Sauter said.
But he has found fewer birds than have the alert citizens of Singen, intrepid hikers who will not be denied their walks along the river, even in wet snow.
They have turned up at least a dozen dead birds, according to Peter Kobuschinski, one of the searchers who must don protective gear and bag the bodies for shipment to labs where they will be tested for the virus.
Indeed, residents are finding birds in areas where people seldom go, especially in winter.
"The citizenry is forcefully engaged," Mr. Hübner said wryly.
The people here do not seem to worry much about the virus in birds, but the cats and dogs are another matter.
Mr. Csajor at the shelter and Mr. Hübner say the problem can be managed with clear communication about what is to be done, but they concede that people are inclined to fear that if the virus spread from birds to a cat, then people cannot be far behind.
This week, sober advice about how to minimize risks filled the Südkurier, Singen's daily newspaper, but some comments from government officials referred obliquely to worries about vigilante killings of sick — or merely suspect — animals. No authority has granted anyone permission to shoot stray cats, one official cautioned.
The anxieties have not totally stolen Singen's sense of humor, where residents' melodious German underscores their easygoing nature.
Frederike Geyer trudged through the snow to snap a picture of the small pink sign warning "Bird Pest — Restricted Area" hanging under a much larger sign marking the city limits.
Ms. Geyer, 17, had been chatting on the Internet with friends who wanted to know if she was all right, and if soldiers had sealed off the town. No, she assured them, she was fine, as were her cats, Würsti, Pöppi and Missi.
"I'm sure some people are worried, but it has taken on a jokey feel for me," she said. "And that's better than panic."
On stealing/piggybacking.
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.
But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.
"I didn't know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what," recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.
The "what" turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system. The additional online traffic nearly choked out the Brodeurs, who pay a $40 monthly fee for their Internet service, slowing their access until it was practically unusable.
Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.
"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.
Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."
Piggybacking, makers of wireless routers say, is increasingly an issue for people who live in densely populated areas like New York City or Chicago, or for anyone clustered in apartment buildings in which Wi-Fi radio waves, with an average range of about 200 feet, can easily bleed through walls, floors and ceilings. Large hotels that offer the service have become bubbling brooks of free access that spill out into nearby homes and restaurants.
"Wi-Fi is in the air, and it is a very low curb, if you will, to step up and use it," said Mike Wolf of ABI Research, a high-technology market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
This is especially true, Mr. Wolf said, because so many users do not bother to secure their networks with passwords or encryption programs. The programs are usually shipped with customers' wireless routers, devices that plug into an Internet connection and make access to it wireless. Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.
Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.
"There's no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access," Ms. Edwards said.
When Mr. Wolf turns on his computer in his suburban Seattle home, he regularly sees on his screen a list of two or three wireless networks that do not belong to him but are nonetheless available for use. Mr. Wolf uses his own wired network at home, but he says he has piggybacked onto someone else's wireless network when traveling.
"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access," Mr. Wolf recalled, explaining that his father, who took along his laptop, needed to send an e-mail message to his boss on the East Coast from Ocean Shores, Wash.. "I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser," Mr. Wolf said. "It took about five minutes."
Jonathan Bettino, a senior product marketing manager for the Belkin Corporation, a major maker of wireless network routers based in Compton, Calif., said home-based wireless networks were becoming a way of life. Unless locking out unauthorized users becomes commonplace, piggybacking is likely to increase, too.
Last year, Mr. Bettino said, there were more than 44 million broadband networks among the more than 100 million households in the United States. Of that number, 16.2 million are expected to be wireless by the end of this year. In 2003, 3.9 million households had wireless access to the Internet, he said.
Humphrey Cheung, the editor of a technology Web site, tomshardware.com, measured how plentiful open wireless networks have become. In April 2004, he and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.
The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks, with only about 30 percent of them encrypted to lock out outsiders, Mr. Cheung said.
"Most people just plug the thing in," he said of those who buy wireless routers. "Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don't bother to turn on its security."
Martha Liliana Ramirez, who lives in Miami, said she had not thought much about securing her $100-a-month Internet connection until recently. Last August, Ms. Ramirez, 31, a real estate agent, discovered a man camped outside her condominium with a laptop pointed at her building.
When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: "Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal."
Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.
Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.
"I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway," Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. "It just seems harmless."
And if she ever gets caught?
"I'm a grandmother," Ms. Freeman said. "They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card."
David Cole, director of product management for Symantec Security Response, a unit of Symantec, a maker of computer security software, said consumers should understand that an open wireless network invites greater vulnerabilities than just a stampede of "freeloading neighbors."
He said savvy users could piggyback into unprotected computers to peer into files containing sensitive financial and personal information, release malicious viruses and worms that could do irreparable damage, or use the computer as a launching pad for identity theft or the uploading and downloading of child pornography.
"The best case is that you end up giving a neighbor a free ride," Mr. Cole said. "The worst case is that someone can destroy your computer, take your files and do some really nefarious things with your network that gets you dragged into court."
Mr. Cole said Symantec and other companies had created software that could not only lock out most network intruders but also protect computers and their content if an intruder managed to gain access.
Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.
"I'm sticking it to the man," said Elaine Ball, an Internet subscriber who lives in Chicago. She complained that she paid $65 a month for Internet access until she recently switched to a $20-a-month promotion plan that would go up to $45 a month after the first three months.
"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on," Ms. Ball said.
For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network's manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.
"Some of them asked me, 'Could we pay?' But we didn't want to go into the Internet service provider business," Mrs. Brodeur said. "We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol."
"Underfoot, Artist at Work"
Underfoot, Artist at Work
By MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
LIKE the scattered cobblestone streets that endure in a growing sea of asphalt, a few stone sidewalks remain among the city's many concrete ones. In 1982, when Ken Hiratsuka, then 23, arrived on a one-way ticket from Japan to New York, he saw those stone sidewalks as a clean slate awaiting his chisel.
"New York is international, New York has no rules," he said in explaining his desire to escape the rigid art training common in Japan.
Mr. Hiratsuka was not entirely right. In sculpturing nearly 40 sidewalks since 1982, he has received many police warnings, and was arrested once, he said, although the judge dismissed the case. .
How does Mr. Hiratsuka defend an art that lives in the legal shadows? Given all the graffiti he saw in New York when he arrived, he did not think his carving would be legally suspect. Even now, though, calling himself a "self-appointed carver," he pleads on behalf of his art. "What I am doing is absolutely fine," he said. "What I am doing is very important."
However one reacts to that answer, it is indisputable that his 24 years of carving have left a large, literal mark on the city. MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
212 21st Street, Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Mr. Hiratsuka made his first New York carving here, in September 1982. He was young and it was all about the spiral, but the chisel slipped. The perfect circle was suddenly heading south instead of west on the sidewalk in front of the building where Mr. Hiratsuka was living. He was troubled by the blunder, but the next day he decided to follow the line and see where it took him. His distinctive style, which High Performance magazine called "Keith Haring meets prehistoric petroglyph," was born. His specialty is one continuous line, at times geometric and sharply angled, at others flowing and figurative. His one rule: the line can never cross itself.
Northwest corner, Broadway and Prince Street, SoHo
As people swarmed around him on their way to Victoria's Secret or Dean & DeLuca, Mr. Hiratsuka recalled the area in the early 80's: "The street lamps were shot out, broken, all the graffiti everywhere." He decided the corner needed life, it needed art. He asked no one's permission. Although the sidewalk carving took only about five hours, the process took two years, 1983 and 1984, as Mr. Hiratsuka chiseled away in the dead of night until a police car rolled up and scared him away. "I got chicken, so scared," he said. "I can't go back, can't carve anymore. But two months later, I was ready again."
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Brooklyn side
"I was enjoying myself, hanging out at crazy bars," Mr. Hiratsuka said. "I was cheerful, young, Japanese, funky artist." But after a few years, he yearned for a place to rejuvenate. He found it on the rocks under the Verrazano, where he fished and carved designs on the surrounding stone. The carvings are hidden by a concrete retaining wall and are etched deep in the schist that glitters with mica and is kissed by the waters of the Narrows. "The earth is eternal," Mr. Hiratsuka said. "All the living creatures can go away, but the stone will remain."
Conservative Jews are considering ending a ban on gay unions and rabbis
Conservative Jews to Consider Ending a Ban on Same-Sex Unions and Gay Rabbis
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
In a closed-door meeting this week in an undisclosed site near Baltimore, a committee of Jewish legal experts who set policy for Conservative Judaism will consider whether to lift their movement's ban on gay rabbis and same-sex unions.
In 1992, this same group, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, declared that Jewish law clearly prohibited commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples and the admission of openly gay people to rabbinical or cantorial schools. The vote was 19 to 3, with one abstention.
Since then, Conservative Jewish leaders say, they have watched as relatives, congregation members and even fellow rabbis publicly revealed their homosexuality. Students at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, the movement's flagship, began wearing buttons saying "Ordination Regardless of Orientation." Rabbis performed same-sex commitment ceremonies despite the ban.
The direction taken by Conservative Jews, who occupy the centrist position in Judaism between the more liberal Reform and the more strict Orthodox, will be closely watched at a time when many Christian denominations are torn over the same issue. Conservative Judaism claims to distinguish itself by adhering to Jewish law and tradition, or halacha, while bending to accommodate modern conditions.
"This is a very difficult moment for the movement," said Rabbi Joel H. Meyers, a nonvoting member of the law committee and executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, which represents the movement's 1,600 rabbis worldwide.
"There are those who are saying, don't change the halacha because the paradigm model of the heterosexual family has to be maintained," said Rabbi Meyers, a stance he said he shared. "On the other hand is a group within the movement who say, look, we will lose thoughtful younger people if we don't make this change, and the movement will look stodgy and behind the times."
Several members of the law committee said in interviews that while anything could happen at their meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than enough votes to pass a legal opinion (a teshuvah in Hebrew) that would support opening the door to gay clergy members and same-sex unions. The law committee has 25 members, but only six votes are required to validate a legal opinion.
Committee members who oppose a change may try to argue that the decision is so momentous that it falls into a different category and requires many more than six votes to pass, even as many as 20, the members said. Other members may argue that no vote should be taken because the committee and the movement are too divided.
The committee may even adopt conflicting opinions, a move that some members say would simply acknowledge the diversity in Conservative Judaism. The committee's decisions are not binding on rabbis but do set direction for the movement.
"I don't think it is either feasible or desirable for a movement like ours to have one approach to Jewish law," said Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel Center, in White Plains, a committee member who has collaborated with three others on a legal opinion advocating lifting the prohibition on homosexuality.
Even if the five Conservative rabbinical schools — in New York, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires and Budapest — adopted different approaches, Rabbi Tucker said, "I don't think that would necessarily do violence to the movement."
The Conservative movement was long the dominant one in American Judaism, but from 1990 to 2000 its share of the nation's Jews shrank to 33 percent from 43 percent, according to the National Jewish Population Survey. In that same period, the Reform movement's share jumped to 39 percent, from 35, making it the largest, while Orthodox grew to 21 percent, from 16 percent. Estimates are difficult, but there are five to six million Jews in the United States.
Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of "American Judaism: A History," said, "In the 1950's when Americans believed everybody should be in the middle, the Conservative movement was deeply in sync with a culture that privileged the center. What happens as American society divides on a liberal-conservative axis is that the middle is a very difficult place to be."
Rabbi Meyers, vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, said he worried that any decision on homosexuality could cause Conservative Jews to migrate to either Reform, which accepts homosexuality, or Orthodoxy, which condemns it. But Dr. Sarna said some studies suggested that many Jews who were more traditional began abandoning the Conservative movement more than 20 years ago, when it began ordaining women.
Few congregants are as preoccupied about homosexuality as are their leaders, said Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and interreligious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who spends weekends at synagogues around the country as a visiting scholar.
"There are so many laws in the Torah about sexual behavior that we choose to ignore, so when we zero in on this one, I have to wonder what's really behind it," Rabbi Visotzky said.
The ban on homosexuality is based on Leviticus 18:22, which says, "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abomination," and a similar verse in Leviticus 20:13.
The law committee now has four legal opinions on the table. Although the reasoning in each is different and complex, two opinions essentially oppose any change to the current law disapproving of homosexuality, and one advocates overturning the law.
A fourth, authored by Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, rector and a professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, argues that the passages in Leviticus refer only to a prohibition on anal sex and that homosexual relationships, rabbis and marriage ceremonies are permissible.
"What we're really trying to do is to maintain the authority of halacha, but also enable gays and lesbians to have a love life sanctioned by Jewish law and guided by Jewish law," said Rabbi Dorff, vice chairman of the law committee.
A change in the ban on homosexuality has been staunchly opposed by the longtime chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch. But Rabbi Schorsch is retiring in June after 20 years, and his successor could greatly affect the policy. Rabbi Schorsch declined to be interviewed for this article. Several Conservative officials said that while Rabbi Schorsch is not a member of the law committee, he is very involved in its deliberations on this issue.
If the law committee does not vote to change the prohibition, some rabbis said, the issue could resurface at the Rabbinical Assembly's convention March 19-23 in Mexico City.
Many students at the seminary say they find the gay ban offensive and would welcome a change, said Daniel Klein, a rabbinical student who helps lead Keshet, a gay rights group on campus. "It's part of the tradition to change, so we're entirely within tradition," he said. Mr. Klein said that even if the law committee did not lift the ban this week, change would come eventually.
"Imagine what will happen 10 years from now when some of my colleagues are on the law committee, when people from my generation are on the law committee," he said. "It's not going to be a close vote."
"Attention Surplus? Re-examining a Disorder" (Interesting)
Attention Surplus? Re-examining a Disorder
By PAUL STEINBERG, M.D.
The recent recommendation that Ritalin and other medications for attention-deficit disorder carry the most serious allowable warning will certainly slow the explosive growth in the use of those drugs.
That was the intention of some members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee that called for the packaging alert, known as a black-box warning.
But the recommendation and concerns about growth in the use of these drugs may force us to think about the disorder, known as A.D.H.D., in new and different ways, from an evolutionary and contextual standpoint.
Every generation likes to believe that it is witnessing the most dramatic epoch in history. In the case of the current Western world, that belief may indeed be accurate, particularly in light of the striking changes of the last 30 years.
As the business writer and consultant Peter Drucker pointed out, most people in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe are "knowledge workers." We live in an information age, in a knowledge-based economy.
For those of us who have "attention-surplus disorder" — a term coined by Dr. Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist in Boston who has A.D.H.D. — this knowledge-based economy has been a godsend. We thrive.
But attention disorder cases, up to 5 to 15 percent of the population, are at a distinct disadvantage. What once conferred certain advantages in a hunter-gatherer era, in an agrarian age or even in an industrial age is now a potentially horrific character flaw, making people feel stupid or lazy and irresponsible, when in fact neither description is apt.
The term attention-deficit disorder turns out to be a misnomer. Most people who have it actually have remarkably good attention spans as long as they are doing activities that they enjoy or find stimulating. As Martha B. Denckla of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore has noted, we should probably be calling the condition something like "intention-inhibition disorder," because it is a condition in which one's best intentions — say, reading 50 pages in a dense textbook or writing a 10-page paper in a timely fashion — go awry.
Essentially, A.D.H.D. is a problem dealing with the menial work of daily life, the tedium involved in many school situations and 9-to-5 jobs.
Another hallmark, impulsivity, or its more positive variant, spontaneity, appears to be a vestige from lower animals forced to survive in the wild. Wild animals cannot survive without an extraordinary ability to react. If predators lurk, they need to act quickly.
This vestige underscores the fact that human genetic variability, the fact that we are not all simply clones of one another, has allowed us to survive as a species for 150,000 years in a variety of contexts and environments.
In essence, attention-deficit disorder is context driven. In many situations of hands-on activities or activities that reward spontaneity, A.D.H.D. is not a disorder.
Ultimately, if studies show convincing evidence that children and adults have been harmed by medications for attention disorder, cardiologists will have every obligation to tell us to halt their use.
But a more fundamental societal accommodation would be highly beneficial — to recognize that each child and adult learns and performs better in certain contexts than others.
As Arthur Levine, president of the Teachers College at Columbia University, has noted, future teachers will be able to individualize and customize the education of students.
Some children and young adults with attention disorder may need more hands-on learning. Some may perform more effectively using computers and games rather than books. Some may do better with field work and wilderness programs.
If it is indeed a context-driven disorder, let's change the contexts in schools to accommodate the needs of children who have it, not just support and accommodate the needs of children with attention-surplus disorder.
For those with attention disorder who wish to be full participants in a knowledge-based world, medications equalize their opportunities. The drugs should and can be used only as needed in the context of dealing with the tedium of school or the drab paperwork of some jobs.
Cardiologists, biostatisticians and consumer advocates may clamor, appropriately or inappropriately, to reduce the use of the medications. But unless we go back to the caveman world, some people will find the drugs increasingly necessary to succeed as knowledge workers in a drastically transformed modern world.
On the recentness of human evolution
Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
By NICHOLAS WADE
Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.
The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.
Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.
Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny.
Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.
The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.
The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.
"There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study.
Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology.
Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change.
The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk.
But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Pritchard's scan of the human genome differs from the previous two because he has developed a statistical test to identify just genes that have started to spread through populations in recent millennia and have not yet become universal, as many advantageous genes eventually do.
The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment. Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals.
Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations.
Dr. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said that it was hard to correlate the specific gene changes in the three populations with events in the archaeological record, but that the timing and nature of the changes in the East Asians and Europeans seemed compatible with the shift to agriculture. Rice farming became widespread in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and agriculture reached Europe from the Near East around the same time.
Skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find before that period, Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans.
That suggests that a change in bone structure occurred in the two populations, perhaps in connection with the shift to agriculture. Dr. Pritchard's team found that several genes associated with embryonic development of the bones had been under selection in East Asians and Europeans, and these could be another sign of the forager-to-farmer transition, Dr. Klein said.
Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to."
Dr. Wells is gathering DNA from across the globe to map in finer detail the genetic variation brought to light by the HapMap project.
Dr. Pritchard's list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis.
The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said.
The five genes show no sign of selective pressure in East Asians.
Because Chinese and Japanese are also pale, Dr. Pritchard said, evolution must have accomplished the same goal in those populations by working through different genes or by changing the same genes — but many thousands of years before, so that the signal of selection is no longer visible to the new test.
Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains.
Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past.
Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations.
Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations.
"It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said.
Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood.
The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact.
Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location.
Dr. Pritchard's test measures the difference in DNA diversity between those who carry a new gene and those who do not, and a significantly lesser diversity is taken as a sign of selection. The difference disappears when the improved gene has swept through the entire population, as eventually happens, so the test picks up only new gene variants on their way to becoming universal.
The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans. The few overlaps between races concern genes that could have been spread by migration or else be instances of independent evolution, Dr. Pritchard said.
Bird Flu Fears and New Rules Rattle German Pet Lovers
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
SINGEN, Germany, March 2 — Hannelore Kirchenmaier burst into the animal shelter here on Thursday, desperate for advice after a chain of events turned the town's household pets into objects of angst.
First, a stray cat died of bird flu on the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. Before long German authorities decreed that all cats had to be kept indoors throughout areas where infected wild birds had been found, including Singen. They also said dogs should stay on leashes when outside.
So there are now millions of pet owners in Germany trying to contend with their beloved four-legged bundles of trouble.
"What are we supposed to do?" asked Ms. Kirchenmaier, 51.
She takes regular care of a friend's dog that has suddenly befriended a wild cat. Should she keep the dog away from the cat? And how could she keep the cat away from birds? "I'd take the cat," she said. "But I already have seven myself."
Bird flu's rapid march from Asia to Europe and Africa has created waves of anxiety and economic disruption; the poultry industry is disabled in much of Europe.
Meanwhile, only the one cat is known to have died of the virus in Europe, and that was far from this town of 44,000, which lies near sprawling Lake Constance, a stone's throw from Switzerland.
But when a dead duck found in Singen was confirmed to have the lethal A(H5N1) strain of bird flu last week, the town became a hotbed of dread. It is facing a challenge to its mood and social rhythms, if not its health.
Cats can become infected with A(H5N1) by eating infected birds but it is very rare. And medical authorities say there is barely any chance of a cat passing the disease to humans.
Such reassurance in Singen came from the head of the animal shelter's board, Marion Csajor, whose precise directions calmed Ms. Kirchenmaier. Feed the wild cat to keep it from gnawing on dead birds, Ms. Csajor counseled her, and tell the authorities immediately if it shows signs of sickness.
Satisfied, Ms. Kirchenmaier hurried off to take the leashed dog on its afternoon walk.
What the shelter cannot do, Ms. Csajor explained later, is take in cats and dogs whose owners now feel threatened by their pets. The 86 cats, 22 dogs and assorted other small critters are her primary charges. "We have to protect the ones we already have," she said.
As the shelter fielded visits and phone calls almost without end, the city government has also been at work.
Last Saturday night, the mayor, Oliver Ehret, received a call from the agriculture minister of the state of Baden-Württemberg confirming that Singen's dead duck had the lethal strain, the mayor's assistant recalled.
The next morning, the assistant, Michael Hübner, looked out of his office window at the town's traditional pre-Lent festival only to see a man cavorting about in a chicken costume. "Boy, if you only knew," he recalled thinking to himself.
The first order of business for Singen was to create quarantine zones from which no birds or bird products could be brought. With only about 3,000 hens in town, laying eggs mainly for private use, this was a fairly minor development.
By early this week, in bitter wintry weather, three two-man teams in brilliant orange uniforms were scouring the banks of the river Aach — where the infected duck was found — in search of other dead fowl. One pair, Werner Sauter and Helmut Heerre, were enjoying minor celebrity status as the town's primary defense against bird flu.
"Lots of people do notice now that there are men in uniforms along the river," Mr. Sauter said.
But he has found fewer birds than have the alert citizens of Singen, intrepid hikers who will not be denied their walks along the river, even in wet snow.
They have turned up at least a dozen dead birds, according to Peter Kobuschinski, one of the searchers who must don protective gear and bag the bodies for shipment to labs where they will be tested for the virus.
Indeed, residents are finding birds in areas where people seldom go, especially in winter.
"The citizenry is forcefully engaged," Mr. Hübner said wryly.
The people here do not seem to worry much about the virus in birds, but the cats and dogs are another matter.
Mr. Csajor at the shelter and Mr. Hübner say the problem can be managed with clear communication about what is to be done, but they concede that people are inclined to fear that if the virus spread from birds to a cat, then people cannot be far behind.
This week, sober advice about how to minimize risks filled the Südkurier, Singen's daily newspaper, but some comments from government officials referred obliquely to worries about vigilante killings of sick — or merely suspect — animals. No authority has granted anyone permission to shoot stray cats, one official cautioned.
The anxieties have not totally stolen Singen's sense of humor, where residents' melodious German underscores their easygoing nature.
Frederike Geyer trudged through the snow to snap a picture of the small pink sign warning "Bird Pest — Restricted Area" hanging under a much larger sign marking the city limits.
Ms. Geyer, 17, had been chatting on the Internet with friends who wanted to know if she was all right, and if soldiers had sealed off the town. No, she assured them, she was fine, as were her cats, Würsti, Pöppi and Missi.
"I'm sure some people are worried, but it has taken on a jokey feel for me," she said. "And that's better than panic."
On stealing/piggybacking.
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.
But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.
"I didn't know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what," recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.
The "what" turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system. The additional online traffic nearly choked out the Brodeurs, who pay a $40 monthly fee for their Internet service, slowing their access until it was practically unusable.
Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.
"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.
Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."
Piggybacking, makers of wireless routers say, is increasingly an issue for people who live in densely populated areas like New York City or Chicago, or for anyone clustered in apartment buildings in which Wi-Fi radio waves, with an average range of about 200 feet, can easily bleed through walls, floors and ceilings. Large hotels that offer the service have become bubbling brooks of free access that spill out into nearby homes and restaurants.
"Wi-Fi is in the air, and it is a very low curb, if you will, to step up and use it," said Mike Wolf of ABI Research, a high-technology market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
This is especially true, Mr. Wolf said, because so many users do not bother to secure their networks with passwords or encryption programs. The programs are usually shipped with customers' wireless routers, devices that plug into an Internet connection and make access to it wireless. Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.
Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.
"There's no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access," Ms. Edwards said.
When Mr. Wolf turns on his computer in his suburban Seattle home, he regularly sees on his screen a list of two or three wireless networks that do not belong to him but are nonetheless available for use. Mr. Wolf uses his own wired network at home, but he says he has piggybacked onto someone else's wireless network when traveling.
"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access," Mr. Wolf recalled, explaining that his father, who took along his laptop, needed to send an e-mail message to his boss on the East Coast from Ocean Shores, Wash.. "I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser," Mr. Wolf said. "It took about five minutes."
Jonathan Bettino, a senior product marketing manager for the Belkin Corporation, a major maker of wireless network routers based in Compton, Calif., said home-based wireless networks were becoming a way of life. Unless locking out unauthorized users becomes commonplace, piggybacking is likely to increase, too.
Last year, Mr. Bettino said, there were more than 44 million broadband networks among the more than 100 million households in the United States. Of that number, 16.2 million are expected to be wireless by the end of this year. In 2003, 3.9 million households had wireless access to the Internet, he said.
Humphrey Cheung, the editor of a technology Web site, tomshardware.com, measured how plentiful open wireless networks have become. In April 2004, he and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.
The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks, with only about 30 percent of them encrypted to lock out outsiders, Mr. Cheung said.
"Most people just plug the thing in," he said of those who buy wireless routers. "Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don't bother to turn on its security."
Martha Liliana Ramirez, who lives in Miami, said she had not thought much about securing her $100-a-month Internet connection until recently. Last August, Ms. Ramirez, 31, a real estate agent, discovered a man camped outside her condominium with a laptop pointed at her building.
When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: "Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal."
Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.
Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.
"I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway," Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. "It just seems harmless."
And if she ever gets caught?
"I'm a grandmother," Ms. Freeman said. "They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card."
David Cole, director of product management for Symantec Security Response, a unit of Symantec, a maker of computer security software, said consumers should understand that an open wireless network invites greater vulnerabilities than just a stampede of "freeloading neighbors."
He said savvy users could piggyback into unprotected computers to peer into files containing sensitive financial and personal information, release malicious viruses and worms that could do irreparable damage, or use the computer as a launching pad for identity theft or the uploading and downloading of child pornography.
"The best case is that you end up giving a neighbor a free ride," Mr. Cole said. "The worst case is that someone can destroy your computer, take your files and do some really nefarious things with your network that gets you dragged into court."
Mr. Cole said Symantec and other companies had created software that could not only lock out most network intruders but also protect computers and their content if an intruder managed to gain access.
Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.
"I'm sticking it to the man," said Elaine Ball, an Internet subscriber who lives in Chicago. She complained that she paid $65 a month for Internet access until she recently switched to a $20-a-month promotion plan that would go up to $45 a month after the first three months.
"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on," Ms. Ball said.
For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network's manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.
"Some of them asked me, 'Could we pay?' But we didn't want to go into the Internet service provider business," Mrs. Brodeur said. "We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol."
"Underfoot, Artist at Work"
Underfoot, Artist at Work
By MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
LIKE the scattered cobblestone streets that endure in a growing sea of asphalt, a few stone sidewalks remain among the city's many concrete ones. In 1982, when Ken Hiratsuka, then 23, arrived on a one-way ticket from Japan to New York, he saw those stone sidewalks as a clean slate awaiting his chisel.
"New York is international, New York has no rules," he said in explaining his desire to escape the rigid art training common in Japan.
Mr. Hiratsuka was not entirely right. In sculpturing nearly 40 sidewalks since 1982, he has received many police warnings, and was arrested once, he said, although the judge dismissed the case. .
How does Mr. Hiratsuka defend an art that lives in the legal shadows? Given all the graffiti he saw in New York when he arrived, he did not think his carving would be legally suspect. Even now, though, calling himself a "self-appointed carver," he pleads on behalf of his art. "What I am doing is absolutely fine," he said. "What I am doing is very important."
However one reacts to that answer, it is indisputable that his 24 years of carving have left a large, literal mark on the city. MEERA SUBRAMANIAN
212 21st Street, Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn
Mr. Hiratsuka made his first New York carving here, in September 1982. He was young and it was all about the spiral, but the chisel slipped. The perfect circle was suddenly heading south instead of west on the sidewalk in front of the building where Mr. Hiratsuka was living. He was troubled by the blunder, but the next day he decided to follow the line and see where it took him. His distinctive style, which High Performance magazine called "Keith Haring meets prehistoric petroglyph," was born. His specialty is one continuous line, at times geometric and sharply angled, at others flowing and figurative. His one rule: the line can never cross itself.
Northwest corner, Broadway and Prince Street, SoHo
As people swarmed around him on their way to Victoria's Secret or Dean & DeLuca, Mr. Hiratsuka recalled the area in the early 80's: "The street lamps were shot out, broken, all the graffiti everywhere." He decided the corner needed life, it needed art. He asked no one's permission. Although the sidewalk carving took only about five hours, the process took two years, 1983 and 1984, as Mr. Hiratsuka chiseled away in the dead of night until a police car rolled up and scared him away. "I got chicken, so scared," he said. "I can't go back, can't carve anymore. But two months later, I was ready again."
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Brooklyn side
"I was enjoying myself, hanging out at crazy bars," Mr. Hiratsuka said. "I was cheerful, young, Japanese, funky artist." But after a few years, he yearned for a place to rejuvenate. He found it on the rocks under the Verrazano, where he fished and carved designs on the surrounding stone. The carvings are hidden by a concrete retaining wall and are etched deep in the schist that glitters with mica and is kissed by the waters of the Narrows. "The earth is eternal," Mr. Hiratsuka said. "All the living creatures can go away, but the stone will remain."
Conservative Jews are considering ending a ban on gay unions and rabbis
Conservative Jews to Consider Ending a Ban on Same-Sex Unions and Gay Rabbis
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
In a closed-door meeting this week in an undisclosed site near Baltimore, a committee of Jewish legal experts who set policy for Conservative Judaism will consider whether to lift their movement's ban on gay rabbis and same-sex unions.
In 1992, this same group, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, declared that Jewish law clearly prohibited commitment ceremonies for same-sex couples and the admission of openly gay people to rabbinical or cantorial schools. The vote was 19 to 3, with one abstention.
Since then, Conservative Jewish leaders say, they have watched as relatives, congregation members and even fellow rabbis publicly revealed their homosexuality. Students at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, the movement's flagship, began wearing buttons saying "Ordination Regardless of Orientation." Rabbis performed same-sex commitment ceremonies despite the ban.
The direction taken by Conservative Jews, who occupy the centrist position in Judaism between the more liberal Reform and the more strict Orthodox, will be closely watched at a time when many Christian denominations are torn over the same issue. Conservative Judaism claims to distinguish itself by adhering to Jewish law and tradition, or halacha, while bending to accommodate modern conditions.
"This is a very difficult moment for the movement," said Rabbi Joel H. Meyers, a nonvoting member of the law committee and executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, which represents the movement's 1,600 rabbis worldwide.
"There are those who are saying, don't change the halacha because the paradigm model of the heterosexual family has to be maintained," said Rabbi Meyers, a stance he said he shared. "On the other hand is a group within the movement who say, look, we will lose thoughtful younger people if we don't make this change, and the movement will look stodgy and behind the times."
Several members of the law committee said in interviews that while anything could happen at their meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday, there were more than enough votes to pass a legal opinion (a teshuvah in Hebrew) that would support opening the door to gay clergy members and same-sex unions. The law committee has 25 members, but only six votes are required to validate a legal opinion.
Committee members who oppose a change may try to argue that the decision is so momentous that it falls into a different category and requires many more than six votes to pass, even as many as 20, the members said. Other members may argue that no vote should be taken because the committee and the movement are too divided.
The committee may even adopt conflicting opinions, a move that some members say would simply acknowledge the diversity in Conservative Judaism. The committee's decisions are not binding on rabbis but do set direction for the movement.
"I don't think it is either feasible or desirable for a movement like ours to have one approach to Jewish law," said Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel Center, in White Plains, a committee member who has collaborated with three others on a legal opinion advocating lifting the prohibition on homosexuality.
Even if the five Conservative rabbinical schools — in New York, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires and Budapest — adopted different approaches, Rabbi Tucker said, "I don't think that would necessarily do violence to the movement."
The Conservative movement was long the dominant one in American Judaism, but from 1990 to 2000 its share of the nation's Jews shrank to 33 percent from 43 percent, according to the National Jewish Population Survey. In that same period, the Reform movement's share jumped to 39 percent, from 35, making it the largest, while Orthodox grew to 21 percent, from 16 percent. Estimates are difficult, but there are five to six million Jews in the United States.
Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of "American Judaism: A History," said, "In the 1950's when Americans believed everybody should be in the middle, the Conservative movement was deeply in sync with a culture that privileged the center. What happens as American society divides on a liberal-conservative axis is that the middle is a very difficult place to be."
Rabbi Meyers, vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly, said he worried that any decision on homosexuality could cause Conservative Jews to migrate to either Reform, which accepts homosexuality, or Orthodoxy, which condemns it. But Dr. Sarna said some studies suggested that many Jews who were more traditional began abandoning the Conservative movement more than 20 years ago, when it began ordaining women.
Few congregants are as preoccupied about homosexuality as are their leaders, said Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and interreligious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who spends weekends at synagogues around the country as a visiting scholar.
"There are so many laws in the Torah about sexual behavior that we choose to ignore, so when we zero in on this one, I have to wonder what's really behind it," Rabbi Visotzky said.
The ban on homosexuality is based on Leviticus 18:22, which says, "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abomination," and a similar verse in Leviticus 20:13.
The law committee now has four legal opinions on the table. Although the reasoning in each is different and complex, two opinions essentially oppose any change to the current law disapproving of homosexuality, and one advocates overturning the law.
A fourth, authored by Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, rector and a professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, argues that the passages in Leviticus refer only to a prohibition on anal sex and that homosexual relationships, rabbis and marriage ceremonies are permissible.
"What we're really trying to do is to maintain the authority of halacha, but also enable gays and lesbians to have a love life sanctioned by Jewish law and guided by Jewish law," said Rabbi Dorff, vice chairman of the law committee.
A change in the ban on homosexuality has been staunchly opposed by the longtime chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch. But Rabbi Schorsch is retiring in June after 20 years, and his successor could greatly affect the policy. Rabbi Schorsch declined to be interviewed for this article. Several Conservative officials said that while Rabbi Schorsch is not a member of the law committee, he is very involved in its deliberations on this issue.
If the law committee does not vote to change the prohibition, some rabbis said, the issue could resurface at the Rabbinical Assembly's convention March 19-23 in Mexico City.
Many students at the seminary say they find the gay ban offensive and would welcome a change, said Daniel Klein, a rabbinical student who helps lead Keshet, a gay rights group on campus. "It's part of the tradition to change, so we're entirely within tradition," he said. Mr. Klein said that even if the law committee did not lift the ban this week, change would come eventually.
"Imagine what will happen 10 years from now when some of my colleagues are on the law committee, when people from my generation are on the law committee," he said. "It's not going to be a close vote."
"Attention Surplus? Re-examining a Disorder" (Interesting)
Attention Surplus? Re-examining a Disorder
By PAUL STEINBERG, M.D.
The recent recommendation that Ritalin and other medications for attention-deficit disorder carry the most serious allowable warning will certainly slow the explosive growth in the use of those drugs.
That was the intention of some members of the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee that called for the packaging alert, known as a black-box warning.
But the recommendation and concerns about growth in the use of these drugs may force us to think about the disorder, known as A.D.H.D., in new and different ways, from an evolutionary and contextual standpoint.
Every generation likes to believe that it is witnessing the most dramatic epoch in history. In the case of the current Western world, that belief may indeed be accurate, particularly in light of the striking changes of the last 30 years.
As the business writer and consultant Peter Drucker pointed out, most people in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe are "knowledge workers." We live in an information age, in a knowledge-based economy.
For those of us who have "attention-surplus disorder" — a term coined by Dr. Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist in Boston who has A.D.H.D. — this knowledge-based economy has been a godsend. We thrive.
But attention disorder cases, up to 5 to 15 percent of the population, are at a distinct disadvantage. What once conferred certain advantages in a hunter-gatherer era, in an agrarian age or even in an industrial age is now a potentially horrific character flaw, making people feel stupid or lazy and irresponsible, when in fact neither description is apt.
The term attention-deficit disorder turns out to be a misnomer. Most people who have it actually have remarkably good attention spans as long as they are doing activities that they enjoy or find stimulating. As Martha B. Denckla of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore has noted, we should probably be calling the condition something like "intention-inhibition disorder," because it is a condition in which one's best intentions — say, reading 50 pages in a dense textbook or writing a 10-page paper in a timely fashion — go awry.
Essentially, A.D.H.D. is a problem dealing with the menial work of daily life, the tedium involved in many school situations and 9-to-5 jobs.
Another hallmark, impulsivity, or its more positive variant, spontaneity, appears to be a vestige from lower animals forced to survive in the wild. Wild animals cannot survive without an extraordinary ability to react. If predators lurk, they need to act quickly.
This vestige underscores the fact that human genetic variability, the fact that we are not all simply clones of one another, has allowed us to survive as a species for 150,000 years in a variety of contexts and environments.
In essence, attention-deficit disorder is context driven. In many situations of hands-on activities or activities that reward spontaneity, A.D.H.D. is not a disorder.
Ultimately, if studies show convincing evidence that children and adults have been harmed by medications for attention disorder, cardiologists will have every obligation to tell us to halt their use.
But a more fundamental societal accommodation would be highly beneficial — to recognize that each child and adult learns and performs better in certain contexts than others.
As Arthur Levine, president of the Teachers College at Columbia University, has noted, future teachers will be able to individualize and customize the education of students.
Some children and young adults with attention disorder may need more hands-on learning. Some may perform more effectively using computers and games rather than books. Some may do better with field work and wilderness programs.
If it is indeed a context-driven disorder, let's change the contexts in schools to accommodate the needs of children who have it, not just support and accommodate the needs of children with attention-surplus disorder.
For those with attention disorder who wish to be full participants in a knowledge-based world, medications equalize their opportunities. The drugs should and can be used only as needed in the context of dealing with the tedium of school or the drab paperwork of some jobs.
Cardiologists, biostatisticians and consumer advocates may clamor, appropriately or inappropriately, to reduce the use of the medications. But unless we go back to the caveman world, some people will find the drugs increasingly necessary to succeed as knowledge workers in a drastically transformed modern world.
On the recentness of human evolution
Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
By NICHOLAS WADE
Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.
The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.
Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.
Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny.
Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.
The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.
The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.
"There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study.
Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology.
Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change.
The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk.
But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Pritchard's scan of the human genome differs from the previous two because he has developed a statistical test to identify just genes that have started to spread through populations in recent millennia and have not yet become universal, as many advantageous genes eventually do.
The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment. Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals.
Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations.
Dr. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said that it was hard to correlate the specific gene changes in the three populations with events in the archaeological record, but that the timing and nature of the changes in the East Asians and Europeans seemed compatible with the shift to agriculture. Rice farming became widespread in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and agriculture reached Europe from the Near East around the same time.
Skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find before that period, Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans.
That suggests that a change in bone structure occurred in the two populations, perhaps in connection with the shift to agriculture. Dr. Pritchard's team found that several genes associated with embryonic development of the bones had been under selection in East Asians and Europeans, and these could be another sign of the forager-to-farmer transition, Dr. Klein said.
Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to."
Dr. Wells is gathering DNA from across the globe to map in finer detail the genetic variation brought to light by the HapMap project.
Dr. Pritchard's list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis.
The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said.
The five genes show no sign of selective pressure in East Asians.
Because Chinese and Japanese are also pale, Dr. Pritchard said, evolution must have accomplished the same goal in those populations by working through different genes or by changing the same genes — but many thousands of years before, so that the signal of selection is no longer visible to the new test.
Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains.
Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past.
Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations.
Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations.
"It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said.
Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood.
The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact.
Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location.
Dr. Pritchard's test measures the difference in DNA diversity between those who carry a new gene and those who do not, and a significantly lesser diversity is taken as a sign of selection. The difference disappears when the improved gene has swept through the entire population, as eventually happens, so the test picks up only new gene variants on their way to becoming universal.
The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans. The few overlaps between races concern genes that could have been spread by migration or else be instances of independent evolution, Dr. Pritchard said.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 04:25 pm (UTC)I know its something to be aware of, but I think people are going a little over the top.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 10:19 pm (UTC)It doesn't cause him huge difficulties, but if you don't get his attention before speaking to him... even sometimes part-way through a conversation that includes more than just him and another person, then he may have taken his attention away and not be hearing anything said. Talking to him when he's driving can lead to problems. And so forth.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 04:25 pm (UTC)I know its something to be aware of, but I think people are going a little over the top.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-11 10:19 pm (UTC)It doesn't cause him huge difficulties, but if you don't get his attention before speaking to him... even sometimes part-way through a conversation that includes more than just him and another person, then he may have taken his attention away and not be hearing anything said. Talking to him when he's driving can lead to problems. And so forth.